One look at my external drives or Dropbox folder and you can tell that I suffer from some form of OCD. Folders can never be too organized or cleaned, and I’m a hoarder. That together means that I spend hours on end organizing and perfecting my most important sets of files.

MUO readers who know my articles or know me as a person can testify that two of my favorite things in the world are portable applications and automation. How great would it be if a portable application could automate the process of organizing your folders? Download Mover has been one of my best-kept secrets for a while now, and in this article it’s time to shed some light on exactly what it’s capable of doing.

Download Mover is an application that was originally coded up to maintain folders that users regularly download to. While this is the most obvious type of folder that needs a babysitter, Download Mover can monitor and organize any folder on your entire hard drive. Unlike the name seems to imply, it is in no way exclusive to downloads.

The download is less than 400 KB in size and, as aforementioned, extracts as a completely portable application. While making use of this application across multiple machines can be tricky, due to the folder-specific nature that we’ll get into soon, it is completely possible to do so by managing common folders in static locations like your Dropbox, or by using separate configuration files for each machine. Nonetheless, Download Mover requires no hard installation and is portable by my definition.

Download Mover was tested by the author under Windows XP but works perfectly fine on Windows 8 for me. That being said, it’s safe to assume it’ll work for any version in between there, 32 or 64-bit.

The application’s interface is extremely straightforward and simple.

To begin using Download Mover, determine what folder you intend to monitor and watch for new downloads. This should be a folder you’re always saving files to or commonly downloading to. After you’ve selected a folder, you’ll then need to determine what type of files you want to move from that folder and to where.

In this field, you’re only able to enter a single extension. Don’t create a list. You’ll have to create a seperate rule for each extension if you need to use multiple extensions.

In the above screenshot, we can look at the more extensive options as well. By default, boxes are checked to show a message when a file is moved and to show error messages. Above this is a field where you can enter an interval (in seconds) that the watched directory will be checked at. Depending on the number of files you’re moving and how frequently, I recommend keeping the first checkbox ticked.

You can then proceed to set up as many different watched directories as you want. They’ll be displayed in a dropdown menu.

Download Mover minimizes to the tray, and be advised that the application needs to be active in your processes for the checks to be run each interval. Right-clicking the tray icon will allow you to disable Download Mover while not completely closing the application, which is convenient. Left-clicking the tray icon a single time will achieve the same goal.

Right-clicking the tray icon also gives you access to the file log and error log. Both are useful for seeing what is going on with the application.

Download Mover’s filtering options aren’t the greatest, only allowing you to move files based on extensions, but it’s a great tool for automating basic organization. I use it almost every day.

What do you think of the application? Do you know of any better alternatives? Let us know in the comments!

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Chris Burns

January 7, 2013 at 10:54 am

I wrote a perl script that did this sort of thing, but the difficult part is knowing when you can move the downloaded file - has it finished downloading or is it only 56% done and has 17min remaining? My approach tried to deal with this by watching the size (and/or modification date) of a file and moving it several minutes after it had stopped growing (or mod. date changing). But even this is just a hack, as if the download stalls before completion, you don't really want to move the file before the download completes.

For Windows there are some alternatives like Belvedere (Which allows you for more flexible rules) or Hygeia (have automation specific to certain filetypes).
Even after trying these though, I find I still prefer to sort things myself, simply because it's more accurate.

Nice article. Real good option for windows. I cannot think of anything else for Windows. But in case anyone is looking for a similar software on Mac, Hazel (http://www.noodlesoft.com/) does it for you :)